The Screaming Winds Trumpeted Disaster

August 18, 2002|BY JONATHON KING STAFF WRITER

When he saw one of his 200-pound fence panels go flipping into the sky, he knew Andrew was not just another storm. The whole family had watched the hurricane's approach on television, stared at the growing red blob, heard the tension in the newscaster's voice grow. But it wasn't real until the wind hit.

"I was on my way to the back room to check out a noise when I saw the fence go," says Ben Horenstein. "And I know how heavy that wood is." With his wife, Ann, and two sons, his sister with her own daughter in a wheelchair, the family hunkered down in its Kendall home.

"I will always remember the sound," Ben says, 10 years later. "You know how a trumpet squeals when the player is really straining? That was the sound at the front door. The wood was buckling, and through that seam between the double doors the wind was screaming to get through."

A decade ago, Andrew came in from the sea. It was officially designated at least a Category 4 storm, balled in a tight fist that punched through South Florida and forever changed it. Winds up to 175 mph scoured the landscape, ripping out centuries-old groves of live oak and scraping clean acres of vegetable and tree farms. Its pry bar fingers tore down 23,200 homes and damaged more than 400,000 from Coral Gables to Key Largo, from Key Biscayne to beyond Krome Avenue. By morning, more than 350,000 people were forced from their homes, and the permanent migration of some 80,000 north to Broward County and beyond changed the human landscape of South Florida.

It was the most intense Florida hurricane in a generation, and it also changed forever the sound of dreams for those who lived through it.

On Aug. 23, l992, like millions of South Floridians on that Sunday afternoon, the Horensteins listened to forecasters tracking Andrew. They stocked some water. Checked the flashlights. Even took the car out of the garage, thinking it might be better off on the lee side of the house. But as a beautifully sunny day grew long, official warnings took on a hard urgency. By late in the evening, no one was pulling punches.

"We're going to see something down here that I hoped I'd never experience," said Bob Sheets, director of the National Hurricane Center at the time.

"The eye is definitely going to hit somewhere in South Florida," said hurricane specialist Lixion Avila. "Wherever the eye hits will be leveled. This is going to be the worst."

Inside a doomed house

Well after dark, the power at the Horensteins' house went out, sending Ben down the hall with a flashlight where he watched the fence section blow away.

By midnight, the entire four-bedroom house was wrenching. Water was seeping through seams in the ceilings. The Horensteins were now all huddled in the hallway, between solid walls, crouched in 3 inches of rising water.

"The noise was incredible. You couldn't really hear individual things smashing because of the overall roar," says Ben. "It was that freight train you always hear described. Like it was running right through the house."

Horenstein pulled towels and blankets out of a closet and draped them over the heads of his family. In hindsight, it was woefully inadequate protection. But it had an unintended benefit. Halfway through their five-hour ordeal, Ben went to the end of the hallway to check on the source of the sound of splintering wood and watched as "the whole ceiling came down all at once." Then, with the underside of the roof exposed, he watched as the roof trusses, like a wet accordion, tumbled against one another and then lifted off, leaving a roofless hole to the sky.

"I was under the blanket and never really looked out," says Ann, who admits today she was probably in shock throughout the night. "If I'd seen the roof go, I probably would have lost it. I was trying to keep our 12-year-old, Brad, calm. He was asking if we were going to die. I said no, we're not going to die. Then he asked what he could do and Ben said all we could do was pray."

Brad began reciting The ShemM-a, a prayer considered as the essence of the Jewish religion.

"I can still hear him in my dreams," Ann says. "Under those wet blankets, repeating the prayer, over and over."

Staying or fleeing

Hundreds of thousands of folk across Miami-Dade were, in their own way, doing the same. Many left early, jamming Interstate 95 and Florida's Turnpike, fleeing upstate or to the Gulf Coast. Many took shelter in designated evacuation centers, much to the dismay of unprepared emergency workers. Many simply steeled themselves to ride it out at home, tucked inside bathrooms or interior closets, listening to battery-powered radios, hoping for the best, whispering their own brand of prayer.

Perhaps Andrew's only grace was that it was fast-moving. It did not stall and settle over land. Compact and holding its energy, the storm carved across the peninsula in only four hours time and made its escape into the Gulf of Mexico off Marco Island.